


smile, the end is nigh

by kwritten



Category: Veronica Mars (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Gen, film canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-17
Updated: 2014-03-17
Packaged: 2018-01-16 01:40:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,016
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1327033
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kwritten/pseuds/kwritten
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Character study of seven Neptune High alums and their relationships to Neptune. for the prompt: "Neptune kids - Everyone in this / room got here somehow and everyone in / this room will have to leave. So what’s left?"</p>
            </blockquote>





	smile, the end is nigh

They say High School is the best time of your life.

They don't say how to deal with life after High School. The movies end with caps thrown into the air and hope all around.

 

Well we lost our hope long ago, imagine that.

 

 

It's a year later and you meet a cute guy in a bar and a headline pops up on the screen behind your head and it's your dad's face, because his ghost haunts you in the form of news reports and Hollywood movie deals.

You fake a phone call and leave before you can exchange names. Before the picture of you in the 10th grade in your pink floral shorts and happy smile flashes on the screen and he knows.

So you go home with your shoes in your hand and there's safety in everyone knowing your name. Now you know why they write songs about it. Because you can fuck that cute guy with a dimple and when his head is between your legs you won't be wondering if he'll be lying beside you in the morning.

You already know he won't.

Sometimes you smile at children in the supermarket and you hope his smile isn't lingering on your face. You smile brighter to push the skin into spaces he didn't occupy. You try to make it all genuine but everything seems false.

Your therapist says you are making progress.

 

 

Everyone wants to get out of their hometown. That's what all the storybooks say. That's what everyone says. Girls from Springfield, Boys from Woodland and they're all seeking escape from the patterns their parents instilled into them.

Some break free.

You won't. You know it. 

Sometimes you wonder why you try.

It isn't one parent and one flaw and one bad habit. It's a town and it calls your name in your sleep until you can't sleep at all.

 

 

High School is the best time of your life unless your girlfriend is murdered and your dad did it. (And he tries to repeat it.) (Neptune is cyclical that way.) (Your life is a broken record that way.)

How cliché. 

It's five years later and you're in a recruiting office and they tell you for the first time in your life that you won't be “Logan Echolls, the movie-star's son” but just _Echolls_ and you smile your smart ass smirk because you don't want them to know that's all you've ever asked the world. 

The screaming in the morning and the exhaustion and the sore muscles are all terrifyingly familiar and you wake up in the night, and the world is dark so you forget that he's not still out there waiting in the dark. 

Patterns are good. Orders are easier. The walls and gates keep you safe as you pretend to be a warrior of the peace.

There's a uniformity to your uniform and you hope to disappear into it. You don't. You are still 'son of a ~~murderer~~ movie star' and there's no anonymity to that.

You aren't protecting your nation.

You're running from yourself.

You ran to a place with walls and shouted orders and schedules and you pretend that it is different and you are safe from yourself. Only it's just the same. And you're never safe.

 

 

They say that the bonds you make in adolescent are the strongest. They don't tell you that you are bound together because you are bound to a space. They don't tell you how to not recognize your dead classsmates' faces on the evening news.

They don't tell you what to do when you are bound to a dead girl and a bus full of dead and a town full of ghosts.

You were all supposed to grow old together, but instead you cling to each other and count down.

One day you'll be next and it won't surprise you.

You were born bathed in your own mortality.

 

 

You take your surfboard and run.

Your dad taught you that. (You wish you had taught it to your brother. You wish you had taught your brother a lot of things. You laugh on a beach under the stars and throw your head back and you are laughing for two because you never taught him and that was your job. Keep drinking, keep forgetting, don't see the ghost sitting beside you.)

People forget you, they ignore you. Your name is a joke and that's easier because you're the joke, not the tragedy. You see your friends, you see their tragic lives, you take another drink and you cover up the ache in your chest with a joke only you laugh at. They pity you. They laugh at you.

You keep laughing because your name is joke and it's not in mourning, it's yours and only yours.

You think you might be one of the lucky ones.

You take another drink.

Luck doesn't keep you numb. You have to work at that.

 

 

There's a town out there that knows your real name no matter how far you run it will always be your home. We aren't our names or our families, we are all the moments and blood in between.

Home is where the heart is, they say.

The don't say that home is the town that saw your heart break and your world shatter and kept the pieces for itself because it was already broken and your pain was just a necessary sacrifice.

Home is where your blood flows and keeps flowing to keep it breathing.

 

 

You stopped being angry about your life at some point in the past. You can see it sometimes, when you walk by. That moment – held timeless by this shit town. There you were, right there on that sidewalk and you saw the girl with your life drive by and she laughed and you were filled with something green and ugly and angry.

And then you saw her eyes. 

They are empty and void. There's no mirth in her laughter. 

You glance to your right and see your reflection in a store window and you are struck by your eyes full and wide and a tear slips down your face.

You walk by that spot and look at your own face in the window and smile a worn out smile at yourself. This is the spot, this is the place, where you lost your anger and started walking forward.

You come back to relive the anger for a moment. You leave it on the street corner but sometimes you come by and try it on like an old coat.

(You never think about the boy who left you crying naked on a hotel room floor.  
That's not part of your story anymore. You can't feel triumphant about that, so you let it drift away in the wind.)

(That's what you told yourself on that street corner.)

 

 

 _I just had to get out,_ you tell the bottle of dark liquid in your hand.

You ignore the fact that you haven't left.

No one leaves until their dead.

(That happens with alarming regularity.)

 

 

When you leave, you are happy and sweet. People like you. You never mention where you are from. _Southern Cali_ you say with a pert toss of your blonde hair and the girl next to you giggles into your neck and slings her arm through yours and it doesn't really matter to you, anyway.

You can feel your face harden the second you get back. (You always come back.) (Most people think you never left.) (You never speak of the girl with sun-kissed skin and soft lips and dark, curling hair on a beach across an ocean or two. Or the flat you had with a five floor walk up and the way she would smile over her coffee in the morning, lazy like a sunset. Or the degree in architecture that is stuffed in a box somewhere with all her handwritten letters, because you made love like it was ancient and timeless all at once and that was reflected in her letter.) Maybe it happens before that, somewhere in flight over land and water a mask slips in place and your spine straightens.

All the people here, with their tragic parents and stories and near-deaths and depression. They don't know what you've had to do to keep yourself strong enough to stand beside them. You had to gain your armor the hard way.

They call you a bitch.

And you are.

But you fucking survived this long. And that's more than they can say.

 

 

All towns are built on secrets. 

That's what they say.

They've never been to your town.

Here, you don't make the secrets – the secrets make you.

 

 

 

You cover it up in straight hair and slim lines and pantsuits. You smile less and laugh more and that steel in your eyes you swear is gone. (Only it's never really gone.) (Sometimes the men complain about it. They peer up at you from where they kneel at your feet and they are surprised by the hardness there. I guess you were never really good at being soft.)

Life is a war. 

That's what home has taught you.

Home is supposed to teach you peace. Supposed to teach you how to resist but stay pure.

There's nothing pure about you. Good intentions are for the feint of heart. You have a very strong disposition.

You sit in the office with your name on the door and put your feet up on the desk with a smile of satisfaction. You weren't running before. You were hiding.

Home is going to war with your eyes wide open.

And the world has never been so clear.

 

 

It's acrobatic act for most people, remembering the details of their prom and their locker and their High School best friend. All of that is in the past. It's forgotten. Life keeps going, the planet keeps spinning, they fall down they get up and it's beautiful.

You can't get the images out of your head. 

That isn't your past. Your past is all around you like broken glass.

There's no struggle to remember – it's a battle to forget. You long to forget. You run anyway you can. With the bottle, with pills, with a nice job, with a baby in your arms – but you are never free. You are always bound.

You are all forever bound.

This is your home.

And home is a battlefield.

 

 

You tell yourself, _just this once_.   
You tell her, _just until it is over_.

You lie to everyone.

You ride the night and the highway is your domain. You are a leader, you are a soldier, the fight is never over.

You tuck your baby into bed and kiss her on the forehead and tell her it is all for her. You tell yourself this is her best chance. You look up at your crying wife and you smile encouragingly and pull her into an embrace and you tell her everything is going to be alright. 

(Nothing was ever alright.) 

You sit at the dinner table and you look at your new domain and you pretend it isn't at odds with the one that was thrust upon you when you were just a child. You smell like leather again and the scent is a rush. Your heart beats with anticipation. Your cut up fists bring a familiar pain and everything is the way it should be. This is your domain.

(You are the victim. You cannot win. Her best chance is for you to leave and never look back. Your best chance is to give the crown to someone else.

You don't.

That's what makes you a King.)

 

 

 

You drive by the old alma mater. 

You see the fresh-faced children standing about and laughing and embracing with the strength and abandon only children have.

They're already trapped and they don't know it yet.

You drive by because you live only five blocks away.

There's no getting out unless your dead.

And then your ghosts haunts the spaces you once walked and keeps the wheels grinding.

Welcome to Neptune.


End file.
